Taxation

Taxes are the major source of mobilizing internal resources of an economy. Bangladesh inherited a system of taxation from its past British and Pakistani rulers. The system, however, developed on the basis of generally accepted canons and there had been efforts towards rationalizing the tax administration for optimizing revenue collection, reducing tax evasion and preventing revenue leakage through system loss. To develop manpower for efficient tax administration, the government runs two training academies – BCS (Tax) Academy at Dhaka for direct tax training and Customs, Excise and Value Added Tax Training Academy at Chittagong for indirect tax training. The national board of revenue (NBR) is the apex tax authority of Bangladesh and it collects around 93% of total taxes or 76% of total public revenues. The NBR portion of total taxes includes customs duty, value added tax (VAT), supplementary duty (SD), excise duty, income tax, foreign travel tax, electricity duty, wealth tax (collected as a surcharge of income tax since fiscal year 1999-2000), turnover tax (TT), air ticket tax, advertisement tax, gift tax and miscellaneous insignificant taxes. Other taxes (amounting to around 7% of total taxes or 5% of total revenues) are often referred to as ‘non-NBR portion’ of tax revenue. These taxes include narcotics duty (collected by the Department of Narcotics Control, Ministry of Home Affairs), land revenue (administered by the Ministry of Land and collected at local Tahsil offices numbered on average, one in every two Union Parishads), non-judicial stamp (collected under the Ministry of Finance), registration fee (collected by the Registration Directorate of the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs) and motor vehicle tax (collected under the Ministry of Communication

Tax Structure in Bangladesh

The tax structure in the Bangladesh consists of both direct (income tax, gift tax, land development tax. non-judicial stamp,...